Mandelbulber Animation

Nanoworld: a Mandelbulb fractal and a sphere primitive

I finally tried the animation feature of the Madelbulber2 fractal surfaces software. From the "View" menu, if you select "Show animation dock" then you are provided with the following controls:

animation controls

For my first animation I set the lower drop-down menu (speed control) to "constant".

"primitives" settings

To create a fractal surface for the animation, I started with a "primitive", a sphere, in the default position (0,0,0) and with the default radius (1). See the "primitives" controls shown to the left. When combined using the union(or) function, this sphere "covered up" part of the default-sized Mandelbulb fractal surface so only the "high altitude" parts of the fractal surface were visible. See the "Nanoworld" image above.

First Humanoid

I used the default material, but selected the image shown to the right for use as a "color texture". You can see that humanoid face "looking out" from the surface of Nanoworld.

In order to make a fractal surface with some interesting features such as tunnels, I combined the following four fractal surfaces (using the "union(or)" method) with the sphere primitive:

I decided to zoom in on the archway (upper left)

1) Mandelbulb
2) Reimann - Sphere Msltoe
3) Box Fold Bulb Pow 2 V2
4 Msltoe - Toroidal Bulb

To render this fractal surface, I used the "Delta DE" method for estimating distances from the camera to the fractal surface.

As a starting point for my animation, I zoomed in on the surface of Nanoworld, just in front to the arched entryway that can be seen "from above" in the image to the left. Some of the images that I show here have been modified in Photoshop so as to include characters from the Grean's Hack series.

Looking through the first archway,
another archway is seen beyond.

For creating the path that would be followed by the moving camera in order to create the animation, I used a low image resolution (half of the smallest preset resolution: 360 x 240 pixels) and a value of 1.0 for the "raymarching" render quality parameter. I clicked on the "record flight path" button and used the mouse cursor to guide the camera through the archway. Each frame for the animation took just a few seconds to render on these low-resolution settings. Then I switched to a larger image size (720 x 480) and 0.1 for the raymarching parameter before clicking "render flight animation". I generally make still renderings at my computer's screen resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels).

The video above shows a raw animation made with Mandelbulber2 and the default Mandelbulb fractal only. Shown below is a longer video, made by combining several animation sequences into tunnels present in the more complex fractal surface described above. The second video (below) was made with iMovie and includes some transition scenes that were made with Photoshop. This second video has an audio track supplied by YouTube: "The Quantum  Realm". For some of the animation sequences, there were 180 degree turns. The default animation settings in Mandelbulber2 for camera momentum and maximum rate of camera movement make it hard to turn the camera quick enough, so I changed those settings at the risk of making the camera a little wobbly as I went through the series of tunnels.

Shown below is a single rendered frame close to the second archway and processed with Photoshop to insert Artep into the scene.

The second archway is cluttered with "alien lifeforms". Artep was added to the scene with Photoshop.

looking back towards the first archway

According to the instructions for Mandelbulber2, I thought that holding down the "shift" key would stop the camera from advancing forward and allow me to turn the camera. However, I could not get that to work.

The image to the right shows the view looking back towards the first archway from the second archway. This image was modified in Photoshop to add some lighting and to add in the two story characters. Without the added lighting, the inside of the archway was rather dark.

Sadly, the instruction manual for Mandelbulber2 does not have a section describing how to use the keyframes feature for animations. At six hours of rendering for a 5 second animation I'm afraid that I'm reaching the limits of this old computer.

 

image source

The video above is an example where I could rotate the camera ('z' and 'x' keys) and control speed of the "flight" with left and right mouse buttons.

Related Reading: other posts in this series about using Mandelbulber2 to make fractal surfaces
- 7 Fractal Surfaces
- Hybridize 7
- 7 Alternate Iterations -

Next: the origins of Mary

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